Gaston Bachelard Quotes
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Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.
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If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.
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Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.
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The reverie would not last if it were not nourished by the images of the sweetness of living, by the illusions of happiness.
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Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.
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The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.
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The metaphor is~ an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately.
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The reflected world is the conquest of calm
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There is no original truth, only original error.
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The house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace
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Any work of science, no matter what its point of departure, cannot become fully convincing until it crosses the boundary between the theoretical and the experimental: Experimentation must give way to argument, and argument must have recourse to experimentation.
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Rilke wrote: 'These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.
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We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.
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Empirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity on the part of the subject.
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An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem.
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True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.
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All knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself.
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Man is an imagining being.
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Very often, I confess, the teller of dreams bores me. His dream could perhaps interest me if it were frankly worked on. But to hear a glorious tale of his insanity! I have not yet clarified, psychoanalytically, this boredom during the recital of other people's dreams. Perhaps I have retained the stiffness of a rationalist. I do not follow the tale of justified incoherence docilely. I always suspect that part of the stupidities being recounted are invented.
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Perhaps it is even a good idea to stir up a rivalry between conceptual and imaginative activity. In any case, one will encounter nothing but disappointments if he intends to make them cooperate. The image can not provide matter for a concept. By giving stability to the image, the concept would stifle its life.
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A man is a man to the extent that he is a superman. A man should be defined by the sum of those tendencies which impel him to surpass the human condition.
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The mollusk's motto would be: one must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in.
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A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
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Any comparison diminishes the expressive qualities of the terms of the comparison.